Lessons

by Ian McEwan

At last he gave up and moved on. Soon he was walking by the Wall, along Niederkirchner Straße. In white paint a graffito read, Sie kamen, sie sahen, sie haben ein bisschen eingekauft—they came, they saw, they did a little shopping. In historical Berlin, Caesar would certainly be remembered. Roland slowed by the remnants of the demolished Gestapo headquarters. There was nothing left above ground. He stopped to look down. A row of white-tiled basement cells glinted in the semi-dark. Here, Jews, communists, social democrats, homosexuals, countless others spent their final moments in agony and terror. The past, the modern past, was a weight, a burden of piled rubble, forgotten grief. But the weight on him was at one remove. It barely weighed at all. The accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell—a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife—was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.

But in the prosperous West, after the mass carnage of two world wars, to live without death became the peculiar privilege and vulnerability of a protected generation. Loud and hungry for sex and goods and much else, it was squeamish about extinction. To Roland

there was one little story, a celebrated thought experiment, well known even to those who had never heard of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger’s cat. A cat concealed in a steel chamber is either killed or not by a randomly activated device. The cat’s state is not known until the chamber is opened. In Schrödinger’s account it is both alive and dead until that moment. In the good outcome, at the reveal, a wave function collapses, the live cat jumps into the arms of its owner, while its other version continues as dead in a universe inaccessible to the owner or her cat. By extension, the world divides at every conceivable moment into an infinitude of invisible possibilities. The Multiple Worlds theory seemed to Roland no less improbable than Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Both were powerful stories and he often summoned the cat when an uncertain matter was about to be resolved. A general election count, the gender of a baby, a football score. The cat came to him in his son’s form, that morning in bed when the phone rang and a policeman spoke. Lawrence was simultaneously in a police cell waking with a hangover, or on a brushed steel surface under a sheet, in a morgue. Two states, both real, in perfect equilibrium and he could no longer bear the policeman’s politeness—he was asking Roland to confirm his address. Whatever a wave function was, it was about to collapse, and he could do it himself. Heave it over the edge. “Where is he? What are you telling me?” “And postcode, if y...

in the mid-seventies, he had formed a poor impression of British writers. It was a defensive posture and dismissive. He saw them on TV arts programmes as well as on stage. He could not take seriously these chaps in ties and suits or tweeds who wore brogues and cardigans when at home all day, who belonged to the Garrick and the Athenaeum, who lived in solid north London villas or Cotswold mansions, who spoke loftily, as one might after a lifetime pontificating from All Souls, Oxford; who had never risked a peep round the doors of perception by taking a drug other than tobacco or alcohol, which they peevishly refused to accept were psychoactive addictive substances; who had, most of them, been to the same two old universities where they all knew each other; who smoked pipes and dreamed of knighthoods. Too many of the women wore pearls and spoke in the snappy tones of a wartime radio announcer. None, men or women, in their writings, so he thought then, ever paused in wonder at the mystery of existence or fear of what must follow. They busied themselves with social surfaces, with sardonic depictions of class difference. In their lightweight tales, the greatest tragedy was a rumbled affair, or a divorce. None but a very few seemed much bothered by poverty, nuclear weapons, the Holocaust or the future of humankind or even the shrinking beauty of the countryside under the onslaught of modern farming.

Alissa’s memoir was a bestseller in Germany and other countries, including Britain. The vile childhoods of others were not only a comfort to many but a means of emotional exploration, and an expression of what everyone knew but needed to keep on hearing: our beginnings shape us and must be faced. Roland was sceptical and not out of loyalty

But if Jane had harmed her daughter, what of the harm that daughter had done her son? Where was the novelist’s honest reckoning? And as with the mothers, so with the father. Roland’s restless marginal life of truncated education and serial monogamy had become Lawrence’s. It wasn’t exactly a gift.

Whenever Roland met religious figures he felt obliged to protect them from his disbelief, which was so complete that even atheism bored him. He was always friendly in an exaggerated way with the local vicar when he met him in the street.

Still, in the Second Law, which was the third because they started at zero, he was reminded of a truth obvious to all householders. Just as heat bled out into cold and not the reverse, so order bled out into chaos and never in reverse. A complex entity like a person eventually died and became a disordered pile of disparate bits which must begin to move apart. The dead never sprang into ordered life, never became the living, whatever the bishops might say or pretend to believe. Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.

By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol? He had thought 1989 was a portal, a wide opening to the future, with everyone streaming through. It was merely a peak.

One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out. The book he required had a hundred chapters, one for each year—a history of the twenty-first century. As things stood he might not get a quarter of the way through. A glimpse of the contents page would be enough. Would a catastrophic global overheating be headed off? Was a Sino-American war woven into the pattern of history? Would the global rash of racist nationalism yield to something more generous, more constructive? Might we reverse the current great extinction of species? Could the open society find new and fairer ways to flourish? Would artificial intelligence make us wise or mad or irrelevant? Could we manage the century without an exchange of nuclear missiles? As he saw it, simply getting through intact to the last day of the twenty-first century, to the end of the book, would be a triumph.

The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense. He accepted that pessimism was the good companion of thought and study, that optimism was the business of politicians, and no one believed them. He knew about the reasons to be cheerful and had sometimes cited the indices, the literacy rates and so on. But they were relative to a wretched past. He couldn’t help himself, there was a novel ugliness about. There were nations run by well-dressed criminal gangs intent on self-enrichment, kept in place by security services, by the rewriting of history and passionate nationalism. Russia was just one. The USA, in a delirium of anger, delusional conspiracies and white supremacy, could yet become another. China had refuted the claim that trade with outsiders opened minds and societies. Now the technology was on hand, it might perfect the totalitarian state and offer a new model of social organisation to compete with or replace liberal democracies—a dictatorship sustained by a reliable flow of consumer goods and a degree of targeted genocide. Roland’s bad dream was of freedom of expression, a shrinking privilege, vanishing for a thousand years. Christian medieval Europe did without it that long. Islam had never much cared for it. But each of these problems was parochial, local to a mere human timescale. They shrank and tightened into a bitter kernel contained within the ...

There was one emollient nostrum he liked: things will never be as good as we hoped or as bad as we feared. But imagine showing a well-meaning Edwardian gent a history of the twentieth century’s first sixty years. The combined mega-deaths of Europe, Russia and China would cause him to buckle and weep. Enough! Those angry or disappointed gods in modern form, Hitler, Nasser, Khrushchev, Kennedy and Gorbachev may